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I'm a well-known mainframe performance guy, with almost 30 years of experience helping customers manage systems. I also dabble in lots of other technology. I've sought to widen the Performance role, incorporating aspects of infrastructural architecture.

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... or "The Nightmare That Never Ends". The concept of a babble phase comes from Child Development: When children are learning to talk they start by making sounds they think might get them somewhere. (Some might say that's a phase they never leave.) Such a developmental stage is called "the babble phase". (The term has been borrowed by Artificial Intelligence researchers - and... [More]

I'm reporting what I'm learning (or I think is significant) in conference sessions on Twitter. My Id is "MartinPacker" and I'm using the Hashtag "#zOS09" to tag my posts. Feel free to follow along. In principle you don't even need to sign up to Twitter to do this. It seems more immediate than posting here. Oh, and feel free to comment on Twitter using the same tag.

It's approaching conference season again - at least the UKCMG / European System z Conference portion of it. Bearing that in mind I want to share this article with you: "Professor Encourages Students to Pass Notes During Class -- via Twitter". It's well worth reading the comments that follow the article. They're rather more enlightening and illustrative than the (short) article itself. I've been in... [More]

Another 6 months on and another HackDay... Hackday6 was on 24 October - and being distracted by little things such as GSE Conference and an important customer situation I haven't blogged about it yet. So, a little late, here goes... Many of you will know that RMF has a WebPortal for monitoring performance and capacity usage. And you'll know that the z10 processor's HMC is web-based (though I don't... [More]

With a couple of working days to go before the deadline I've completed my two presentations for Expo. As usual I've added some new stuff, based on new technologies and some situations I've encountered. And rather than throwing older stuff out I've moved most of it to backup foils. While I'm prepared to present the backup material I don't expect to have time to in the sessions. But at least you'll... [More]

A couple of days ago I attended the pilot of a "Web 2.0 and System z" workshop in the Boeblingen lab. I'm pleased to say the room was full - both with IBMers and non-IBMers. And I think my presentation - which was basically a rant about Web 2.0 Behaviours and why we should adopt them as mainframe folks :-) - went OK. One of the things that was interesting about it was that on greeting Luis Suarez... [More]

Many of you will have, by now, installed the Adobe AIR runtime. Most probably it will be to run something like Twhirl. At this point many of you will be asking "what's Twhirl?" If I said it was a nice desktop application that makes using Twitter so much easier I hope you don't ask "what's Twitter?" :-) So, we're beginning to see these desktop applications coded using Adobe AIR, which stands for... [More]

The other three residents are busy doing extensive setup work - and we hope to have some nice measurements later on. (I'm not sure how much later on there actually is, mind.) :-) So I have no RMF or DB2 SMF to play with yet. :-( Meanwhile I'm beginning to come up to speed again after the glorious experience of recovering from moving five time zones to the west. :-) So I actually got to writing... [More]

So, I'm about to start writing. At last! As a team we had a discussion yesterday about how to deal with performance numbers. One of the roles I'm playing on the team is "the guy who writes about performance numbers". So we came to the following conclusions: We really can't talk about products made by other people - such as SAS/MXG or TMON for DB2. That's right out - because of our basic provenance... [More]

I'm going to try something different this year – and composing this using OpenOffice Writer on my new ASUS EEE PC while flying home is certainly different. But what's new is not documenting all the bits and pieces I learnt. Instead I'm going to give some impressions: On Monday afternoon we had an enforced evacuation from the conference centre and much of the environs – because of a World War II... [More]

Here's an interesting BBC News Article: Vehicle warning system trialled . So let me see now, when we said the fridge would talk to the microwave - as everything would have an IP address - did we really envisage that they would Twitter? :-) Can you imagine "The Bloggings of an uncleaned fridge?" :-) And can you imagine what'd happen if my fridge started Twittering and next door's microwave yakked... [More]

Here's a useful contribution to the debate about Twitter: From a friend's blog . There's much mileage in the comments - which is where the action really hots up. :-) Actually her blog is in general a good read - but maybe I'm biased as she's a friend of mine. She's a Web 2.0 enthusiast with a great line in photos and original art. (If you want a business justification for reading her blog she's a... [More]